Overclocking with the Asus V8420
was an interesting venture to say the least. Although Asus
does provide it's own tweak utility, we opted to use the Coolbits registry hack as
we have done for previous reviews.
The V8420's core clock speed is 260Mhz, with a
550MHz memory clock, which we know is conservative speed for
3.3ns DDR modules. We were expecting to reach the 300/600+ range, and
we're happy to report, we were not disappointed. We upped
the clock speed
+5/+10MHz intervals until we reached a completely stable 300MHz / 630MHz
core and memory clocks. Already impressed, we moved onward and finally
locked up 3DMark at 310/650. We then started tinkering with these
numbers and found that we maxed out the core clock at 308MHz,
but the RAM still seemed to have some headroom. We kept pushing the speeds up, now in 5MHz increments
until we maxed out Coolbits at 690MHz. Yes, you read that
correctly. We then used PowerStrip and keep pressing on
until we eventually ended up
at 712MHz, 162Mhz over the original speed! We
obviously can't vouch
that every overclocker will get the same results with their
card, but this was definitely an impressive increase in
clock speed! We ran three sets of Quake 3 and three sets of
3DMark numbers while the card was overclocked, and then compared them to the original
scores.

In Quake 3, we picked up from
20-30 frames per second by overclocking the Asus V8420. At
1024x768, the score was right behind the Ti4600,
and the overclocked Ti4200 eclipsed the 4600 in the other
two tests. The same pattern was repeated with 3DMark 2001SE. The
scores increased nicely when overclocked, and pushed past
the Ti4600 at higher resolutions. It's tough to justify spending extra money
on a Ti4600 when you can get the extra performance for free?

What's not to like about the
Asus V8420 Deluxe GeForce 4 Ti4200? At a price as low as $200 (found on
various price search engines) you get a top quality video
card, two full games and a nice suite of programs and
utilities. You also get all of the adapters necessary for
connecting your PC to a second VGA monitor or a breakout box
that can be used for playing games on a television.
Finally, as if there weren't enough goodies, there is a pair of 3D stereoscopic glasses, that
really put
the "3D" in three-dimensional gaming. The card comes stocked
with an ample amount of RAM for buffering those high-res textures, and the
purple PCB looks great in a modded case. It was also an
interesting endeavor finding out how high the V8420 would overclock.
In fact, it
surpassed all of the previous Ti4200s we have reviewed. Obtaining
these speeds provides the performance of a card that is nearly twice
its price and doesn't even take into account the bundle of
hardware and software. Asus didn't just allow us to raise
the speeds with this card, they raised the bar for all other GeForce 4 Ti 4200 cards
in our opinion...